War

In yet another attack by a ‘rogue’ Afghan soldier, four French troops were shot dead last week.

Proponents of the current post-modern war fighting doctrine continue to believe we can make people love us.  Counterinsurgency has been a convenient doctrine swallowed by Western leaders as a politically correct way to fight a war. But it is built on the well-meaning principle of “hearts and minds” when it is nothing more than an unhealthy blend of social engineering and pork-barrel politics. 

The fact is in Afghanistan they love you until the money stops and even then, as the latest incidents show, nothing will bridge the cultural divide.

Continue reading "In Afghanistan trust no one and question everything" »

In the film Balibo, five journalists paint an Australian flag and the word ‘Australia’ on the wall of their ‘safe’ house. They are then coldly executed by the invading Indonesians.

They believed – naively, in retrospect - that their very Australianness and their civilian status as journalists would save them.

Their brutal slaying outrages us, offends our sense of fairness – and shows that the concept of fairness is an odd sort of idea to have in the midst of carnage.

Continue reading "All’s not fair in war" »

Author Craig Shirley announced with some fanfare in The Australian that the United States had “no intelligence of a potential Japanese attack.”

Tell us something we don’t know.

Writing all the way back in 1962, Roberta Wohlstetter made clear that the United States “failed to anticipate [the] Pearl Harbor [attack] not for want of the relevant materials, but because of a plethora of irrelevant issues.”

Continue reading "Pearl Harbor attack highlights lack of intelligence" »

As we approach the Centenary of World War I, we start to think about the tremendous sacrifice so many of our diggers made. It is unimaginable to think that over 60,000 young men died in Gallipoli and the Western Front.

When you visit the battlefields of France and Belgium and the cemeteries and memorials you see countless numbers of white crosses honoring the fallen. Many of those crosses are for soldiers who are “Known Only to God”.

At the various memorials such as VC Corner and Menin Gate the names of those who were missing in action are engraved in stone. The Australian Government’s official estimation is there are approximately 18,000 Diggers lying under the fields of France and Belgium.

Continue reading "Digging up fallen diggers is the ultimate indignity" »

It’s Remembrance Day. And this year, we have more to remember than ever.

Ashley Birt, 22. Bryce Duffy, 26. Luke Gavin, 29. Rowan Robinson, 23. Todd Langley, 35. They’re all diggers killed in Afghanistan, and that’s just since June.

While we’re remembering them though, we need to jog our memories a little further. Because over the course of this Very Long War in Afghanistan, there’s a lot that we’ve forgotten.

Continue reading "As we remember our fallen, we forget why we went to war" »

The recent string of casualties inflicted on Australian trainers by their Afghan students is part of the ongoing tragedy of war. It is also not making the job of selling the Afghan War to the Australian population any easier.

A recent Roy Morgan poll says that 72 per cent of Australians want to withdraw the troops. That’s good because we are, of course, going to withdraw and our casualties must be seen in that context. The withdrawal date is already set as 2014 and barring some strategic change, our combat troops will leave.

The Prime Minister has announced that there will be an ongoing training commitment to Afghanistan, but the detail is unclear. Of course, if there were no consequences for the withdrawal of our troops, they would have been withdrawn long ago.

Continue reading "Afghanistan: It is the manner of our leaving that matters" »

Writer, comedian and Can of Worms reporter Dan Ilic visited Aussie diggers in Afghanistan last month to perform a series of comedy shows. Today, he writes about what he saw and experienced, in the first of a two-part report.

Here are some tips for comedians. Never try out new jokes to a hostile crowd. If you do, keep it short.

Whatever you do, don’t go out to an unfamiliar audience and give them 15 minutes of new material you wrote just for them until you’ve actually learnt all the jokes. I did this recently on stage in front of a crowd of about 50.

I could tell the gig was going to be dull. It’s called Funny Shui: the audience all self-consciously sit as far away as possible from the stage. I couldn’t even make eye contact with this group. Showtime.

Continue reading "My Kandahar comedy show that literally bombed" »

Three more Australians are dead, and seven injured, in Afghanistan. It’s even more tragic because it appears the killer was an Afghan soldier, a colleague. Follow the news at news.com.au. Nathan Mullins spent time with the Australian Special Forces in Oruzgan, and this is his perspective on the many questions that beset Australia about our role in Afghanistan.

What are ‘we’ doing in Afghanistan? People ask me whether we can win the war. That’s not the important question. The question is whether we should be trying to ‘win’ in the first place. But before that the question is: who’s ‘we’? We the Coalition, we the Australian Army, we Australians, or indeed, we the western world? It’s a long way from Melbourne to Afghanistan, both geographically and figuratively, but when I had the chance to fight in the hills and valleys of Uruzgan with the Australian Special Forces, I did it. I needed to know if ‘we’ should be there.

When I decided to go I thought I represented the Australian Army. While I was there I realized that the people of Afghanistan feel isolated from the rest of the world. They didn’t see me as an Australian soldier, or an Australian really, they saw me as a citizen of a world that was so foreign to them as to barely exist.

Continue reading "We are doing the right thing in Afghanistan" »

It’s a pretty reasonable guess that, over the coming week, we’re going to hear a LOT more about the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Ten years on from that awful event, the media will hammer us remorselessly with commemorative newspaper liftouts and TV specials, and we’ll quickly tire of emotionally-loaded words like “courage”, “tragic” and “heroism” being used ad nauseam.

At times, it will seem like a collective remembrance of tragedy almost completely disproportionate in scale to the nearly three thousand lives lost on that day. (Which, to put that number in perspective, is one fifth of the number of people that died in March this year as a result of Japan’s earthquake and tsunami.)

Continue reading "The day that changed everything" »

It was not until I recently heard an art historian visiting Australia to talk about Guernica – the iconic anti-war painting by Pablo Picasso – that I connected the dots of why the 9/11 attacks had such a penetrating impact on the global community.

Art historian Professor Timothy J Clark was explaining in a Sydney Ideas lecture why Picasso’s depiction of the world’s first terrorist air-raid continues to have political currency in the post-9/11 era, despite the existence of more “real” forms of media than existed in 1937.

Clark said that in essence Picasso managed to communicate what it is really like to be bombed. He told me after the speech that “Guernica wouldn’t have its continuing political relevance if it didn’t somehow manage to wrench the material reality of suffering out of that black and white virtual world”.

Continue reading "Cool heads are needed when horror is writ large" »

It’s hard to wipe your bum if you have no hands. It’s hard to win at marbles when you only have one eye. And it’s pretty hard to work as a farmer when you have no legs.

Seems pretty wacky, but this is the reality of living in a country beset with bombs dropped by our coalition partners over thirty years ago.

I’ve just returned from working in Laos with UNICEF and was shocked to learn of the ongoing problems Australia has played a part in creating. I was even more shocked to think that Australia wants to continue to be involved in such a brutal manner of war.

Continue reading "Bomb legislation is a complete cluster f—k" »

Yesterday, News Ltd national defence writer Ian McPhedran argued that it’s our moral duty to stay the course in Afghanistan, both to honour fallen diggers and for the sake of the mission itself. Many ordinary people took exception, arguing the best way to honour the fallen is to withdraw from the whole exercise.

In any war in which Australia is involved, mainstream public figures rarely question our commitment to the conflict. To do so is seen as the equivalent of saying the fallen died for nothing.

Ordinary people know better. In war, as in life, the ground shifts. The perfectly valid reason you got involved several years back may no longer hold up today. Funny thing is, war movies have long echoed this theme. Maybe it’s time our leaders took a trip to the video store…

Continue reading "Six famous war films, and their lessons for our leaders" »

As another Australian family endures the soul-destroying grief of the loss of a young son in Afghanistan - the fourth in a week -  the debate about the nation’s role in the campaign has shifted into fraught territory.

Some surveys show that the majority of Australians want the troops to be brought home immediately. Our political leaders say we must hold our nerve and harden our resolve for more losses in the weeks ahead.

Given that only two of the four latest casualties, Sgt Brett Wood and special-forces combat engineer Rowan Jaie Robinson, were killed in action fighting the Taliban the bipartisan position is the right one for a host of reasons. 

Continue reading "Afghanistan: We honour the fallen by staying the course" »

Australian Soldiers are the strongest tribe in Uruzgan Province and it is this profile that wins hearts and minds in Afghanistan, not well-meaning gestures of handing out bags of money.

It is that strategic change over the last 18 months that is now paying off in Uruzgan. Afghans respond to what some may call traditional characteristics of bravery, courage, honour and revenge. They are also very polite, even though tomorrow they may kill you. If you could bring back Alexander the Great, he would say we are fighting the same people, using the same tactics they used against him 2,000 years ago.

Despite what Australia’s David Kilcullen, the architect of this new pop military version of counterinsurgency (COIN), will have you believe, this is not about a kindler gentler war. There has been a grave misrepresentation of COIN. In fact, unlike author of The Strongest Tribe former Marine Commander Bing West, who has spent endless nights bunkered down under fire with troops, I doubt whether Kilcullen would have been to very far off Route One.

Continue reading "Strength, not kindness, will win Afghan hearts & minds" »

The deaths of another two Australian diggers in Afghanistan will not weaken the Government’s resolve to stay the course, Prime Minister Julia Gillard has vowed.

But the particular nature of one of those deaths - a violent betrayal which saw 25-year-old Lance Corporal Andrew Jones shot dead by a supposedly friendly Afghan National Army soldier who had been trained by Australia - has sent shockwaves through the defence forces.

Trust between the two militaries has been severely shaken.

Continue reading "Each death in Afghanistan is another test of faith" »

The death of Osama Bin Laden will make no difference to global terrorism inspired by Islamic fundamentalism, and it will have scant impact on the war in Afghanistan. 

But the way that the US killed Osama Bin Laden needs recognition; it was the sort of precise, human intelligence-driven operation that must be employed ruthlessly in Afghanistan to capture or kill insurgent leaders as we enter another fighting season.

Al-Qaida has not been about Osama bin Laden for quite some time and the Taliban in Afghanistan have not received support from al-Qaida or Osama Bin Laden since the end of initial operations in 2001.  The global Islamic terrorist movement is now a leaderless jihad and is more likely to come from a young IT whiz-kid in his bedroom in one of our leafy suburbs than from an old man hiding in the mountains of the AfPak border. 

Continue reading "Terror: Coming to a leafy suburb near you" »

In the wake of the latest scandal to hit Defence, Defence Minister Stephen Smith has announced six inquiries, and says the Government will fasttrack changes so women can fight in all the most dangerous frontline positions. The Punch spoke to Australian Defence Association executive director Neil James about the move.

Q. Do you think women should be on the front line?

A. We support the fact that women in the Australian Defence Force serve on the front line and in combat (to the extent they currently can)... we also support the current scientific study into expanding the range of roles for women on the front line. We support evidence-based decisions - not emotive sloganeering.

This topic comes up every six to eight months and the discussion is never intellectually robust. Too many people enter it from an ideological viewpoint or they’re not across the facts. This is clearly a diversion by the minister - to divert attention from the fact none of the inquiries he’s called will investigate his apparent abuse of ministerial authority. He’s announced six reviews but none of them will include an investigation of him.

Continue reading "Consider this before you send women to the frontline" »

What next in Libya? The initial demonstration of strength we saw yesterday is really just the beginning. (Follow live updates here.)

As US Defence Secretary Gates has rightly observed “a no-fly zone begins with an attack on Libya to destroy the air defences”. This underscores the inevitability of escalation for which a no-fly zone has set the scene, one way or another.

Even if Gaddafi, out of character, orders his aircraft or ground installations not to engage the foreign forces from here on, or they revolt out of fear or relief, that is not the end of it.

Continue reading "A necessary attack, now for the really tricky bit" »

Like every other family values-oriented Australian I have been deeply impressed this week by Charlie Sheen’s commitment to his children and his efforts to avenge their removal from his custody by removing their mother’s teeth.

You rarely get that sort of passionate parenting these days.

As many people will know, Sheen’s two-year-old twins were placed in the care of his ex-wife Brooke Mueller and taken away from the house he shares with two porn stars.

Continue reading "Anyone ever seen Gaddafi and Sheen in the same room?" »

Afghanistan, an uncertain world, and regional instability will make 2011 a challenging year for the Australian Defence Force.

The campaign in Afghanistan will dominate the military landscape this year as Australia and the other 44 nations involved in the International Assistance Force (ISAF) struggle to develop a workable exit strategy for the eight-year conflict.

Prime Minister Julia Gillard has flagged a further decade-long involvement for Australian troops, but such a commitment will become increasingly difficult to justify as casualties mount during the coming fighting season. Pressure will build for a complete withdrawal once the training role is complete in Oruzgan Province (about 2014) where most of the 1550 Australians are working.

Continue reading "Afghanistan is one of many challenges for 2011" »

One can’t help but compare the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks to that of a cat with nine lives.

They seem to die over and over again with no resolution, but how long until their luck runs out, the blood boils over and the Gaza region breaks out in all out war.

Since the establishment of the state of Israel, crisis points have come and gone and the populations of Jewish and Palestinian peoples have found no peace. Unfortunately this time will be no different.

Continue reading "Netanyahu standing in the way of his own peace" »

It’s quite sad the questions people ask when they hear you’ve just been in Afghanistan performing comedy shows for our troops.

“Were you scared?”

“Did you get shot at?”

“Was it hot?” 

Continue reading "Don’t mention the war - it’s about the troops" »

Australians are bombarded with advertising and initiatives from governments educating the public about health risks. Smoking kills. Occupational health and safety regulations are law.  “Is gambling a problem for you?”

It makes sense, educating the public on health issues saves money in the long run, is preventative and reduces risks.  And yet one of the most pervasive, damaging and normalised threats to public health remains taboo and largely unaddressed.

Violence against women is a critical human rights and public health issue. One in three women will experience violence in her lifetime. It is normalised, domesticated and prevalent.

Continue reading "Ignoring violence against women costs their dignity" »

What time is it in the world? When U2 launched the Australian leg of their 360 tour last week in Melbourne, this seemingly nonsensical question was repeated and alluded to throughout the show. 

As the apparent motif of their tour, the question begs consideration. 

Over the years U2 have consistently encouraged their fans to develop a political and social consciousness, in stark contrast to the spiritual vacuity promoted by most mainstream musicians. 

Continue reading "In defence of Bono and U2" »

In October 2007 two unarmed Iraqi women were shot and killed by private military contractors working for Unity Resources Group (URG), the same firm that now guards the Australian embassy in Baghdad. 

Just over a year earlier, contractors from the same company shot and killed a 72 year old Australian academic for failing to stop at a checkpoint.

The Defence Department recently told a Senate committee it was aware of the incidents when it awarded URG the embassy contract, but based on third party reports from “American, Iraqi and British authorities” decided the shootings were justified.

Continue reading "Private military firms need greater scrutiny" »

The Korean War stopped for practical purposes in 1953, but technically, it never ended.

This is a matter of theory for most people around the world, but clearly for the North Korean leadership – and many of its brainwashed people – it’s a brutal reality.

This week’s shelling by North Korea of the South Korean island of Yeonpyeong was just the latest illustration of this attitude.

Continue reading "The Korean War never ended" »

But for a sniper’s sticky trigger, I would not be sitting here writing a last minute article about forgetting to remember Remembrance Day.

For those whose history is a little fuzzy, what was first known as Armistice Day commemorates the moment the guns of the Western Front fell silent at the end of the First World War, at 11am on 11 November 1918. 

It became Remembrance Day after the Second World War, and has since become an opportunity for us to pay tribute to all those who have made the ultimate sacrifice in conflicts past and present. At 11am, time stands still.

Continue reading "Why we should remember not to forget" »

I have listened with great interest to this week’s parliamentary debate about Australia’s involvement in Afghanistan, just as I have listened with great interest to this debate for the past nine years, since October 7th, 2001, when Operation Enduring Freedom was launched by the United States and its allies, including Australia, so that freedom so bravely won by the people of Afghanistan from communist oppression, and so cruelly lost over the following decade to civil war and Taliban misrule, may indeed return, and this time endure.

I have listened to this debate and heard many arguments that we should abandon our mission in Afghanistan. 

Some of these arguments are passionate, others cold and rational; some seem sincere, while others callous. And all of them are wrong.

Continue reading "Ending Afghanistan will aid a monstrous regime" »

With the beginning of a parliamentary debate into the war in Afghanistan this week, the more localised conflict between Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott of trips to the warzone came to a periodic truce.

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But the outbreak of the highly politicised PR war between the leaders over who was supporting the troops in Afghanistan more does bring us to an interesting question: what is the point of politicians hanging in war zones?

Earlier in the week the Greens Senator Bob Brown was asked by the 7:30 Report’s Kerry O’Brien why, as the leader of a party pushing for troop withdrawal from the war, he had not visited Afghanistan.

Continue reading "The growth industry of pollies in war zones" »

The Australian public are being fed a one dimensional view of Afghanistan by both sides of politics that is misleading and will only result in further domestic political frustration and a public continuing to question why our troops are not winning the war. 

Our mission in Afghanistan will not be successful through military engagement alone.  The Prime Minister must publicly acknowledge that our mission in Afghanistan will only succeed through the implementation of a range of mainly direct civilian engagements outside the safety of our Forward Operating Bases and a long way from the good coffee in the safe compounds in Kabul.

War is armed politics and counterinsurgency is an armed variant of domestic politics in which numerous challengers compete for control over the population.

Continue reading "Our leaders have no idea how to “win” in Afghanistan" »

Advisory: The following post contains graphic content which some people may find distressing.

Everyone suffers in war. No exceptions. I have been travelling to Afghanistan now for over three years. Covering the conflict from an outsider’s perspective, not getting involved or emotionally attached to the people I photograph. This is hard. Maintaining perspective and impartialility each day is challenging.

Watching soldiers die on the battlefield for a belief in something so far remote from them, is at times very difficult. They fight because they are told to and because if they do not, they will probably be killed by an ill-equipped and under trained Afghan insurgent - or a farmer with a grudge and no money to feed his family.

Continue reading "Into an Afghan hot zone with a ‘Dustoff’ crew" »

The Greens might not have the balance of power in the Senate until next July but one of Bob Brown’s proposals, a parliamentary debate on our military commitment in Afghanistan, should be indulged well before then.

Nine years into a war that has recently grown much more dangerous for our troops the two major political parties have fallen back on a bit of a “just because” argument for why we should remain in such a Hell hole.

It’s an accepted reality that both sides are in unanimous support for our mission. But as public unease with the growing Australian toll intensifies, our leaders have failed to properly articulate much beyond championing our training role and that “progress is being made.”

Continue reading "What exactly are we aiming for in Afghanistan?" »

Well we’re leaving Afghanistan, it’s just not entirely clear when.

Today Defence Minister John Faulkner has announced changes to our role in Afghanistan that have been made necessary by the withdrawal of Dutch troops in August.

At the same time the Defence Minister gave a qualified timetable for withdrawal between 2012 and 2014, and then assured us that he wasn’t doing that.

Continue reading "Are we leaving Afghanistan or not?" »

Update 1:30 PM: Kevin Rudd has told a meeting of Labor MPs this morning that Australia has a “definite and finite” role in Afghanistan, but has not pointed to any specific withdrawal timetable.
The deaths of another three soldiers in a helicopter crash in Afghanistan means five Australian soldiers have been killed in Afghanistan in two weeks. 

The latest tragedy means 16 Australian soldiers have now been killed in Afghanistan, since Australian forces joined with American led coalition forces after the September 11 attacks all the way back in 2001.

For good reason politicians and parties in Australia are generally loath to be seen politicising the deaths of young people who serve their country, but the number and regularity of the deaths of our soldiers in Afghanistan leads to inevitable questions for the Government about our future there.

Continue reading "Should Rudd pull us out of Afghanistan?" »

Throughout history millions have urged us to ‘make love, not war’ and an important voice has just joined this choir.

On Tuesday, Australia’s former Army Chief, Peter Leahy, suggested that the defence budget should be cut and redirected towards its diplomacy and aid programs – and no, he wasn’t wearing flares or dreads.

Continue reading "Former army chief says ‘make love, not war’" »

An evocative photograph taken last week underscored that old utterance about a picture being worth a thousand words, and prompted at the same time some perennial questions about war in general, and about the particular war being waged at present in Afghanistan.

The AP photograph showed a small boy in the Afghan province of Helmand, standing on top of a small mound, his left hand reached out to clasp the right hand of a uniformed and heavily-equipped US marine.

Just what the two of them might have said to one another was not recorded in the caption, nor in the report below, which detailed a call from the UK Minister for International Defence and Security, Baroness Ann Taylor, for Australia to commit more troops to the NATO effort against the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.

Continue reading "Afghanistan needs us to decide if we’re fighting on" »

On 28th July 2009, I flew out of Sydney bound for Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. It was to be the start of a fascinating trip into the Afghan war zone.

I embedded with the American 10th Mountain Division in Logar province, in the East part of the country. I was then shipped out to “The Tip of The Spear” as they called it, to the district of Kherwar.

The unit I joined was part of the Coalition’s blocking force against Taliban forces who are trying to use the area as an alternative entry point to the Wardack province and into Kabul.

Continue reading "Heart of darkness: inside the Afghan war zone" »

I read with glee this week the news that the Rudd government is reviewing the role of women in the Defence Force.

For some reason this always gets me riled.

Call me a bra-burning feminist with hairy under-arms and a Subaru if you like, but it appears to me that men don’t want women in the military because they are scared of themselves.

Continue reading "ADF: give us girls a go" »

An old newspaper can work like a telescope into the past, the details sharp but the whole picture a little shaky and blurred, and the newspaper on my wall is like that. It’s the front of the Melbourne Argus for Sunday, September the third, 1939, and it contains only one story, told in a series of blaring headlines.

BRITAIN AT WAR
DECLARED AT 8.20 P.M.
‘OUR CONSCIENCE CLEAR’ – MR CHAMBERLAIN
LONDON, TO-NIGHT
A DECLARATION THAT A STATE OF WAR EXISTED BETWEEN BRITAIN AND GERMANY WAS MADE BY THE PRIME MINISTER, MR CHAMBERLAIN, TO THE NATION FROM NO. 10 DOWNING STREET TO-NIGHT.

Continue reading "70 years on, how Australia too was at war" »

Until last week, I thought the silliest casualty of modern warfare was the word “bomb”, which in many news reports had become known by the acronym IED, or improvised explosive device.

IED might be a handy term for military strategists needing to distinguish between a mortar fired from a well-equipped conventional unit of soldiers and a bucket full of fertiliser and nails left by an anonymous freelancer in a car on a crowded street in Baghdad, but to the media, any explosive device whose detonation imperils those in the immediate vicinity should, provided it’s not Barry Hall after giving away a couple of 50s, be simply referred to as what it is: a bomb.

To do otherwise simply buries the true horror of the incident under a comforting layer of jargon.

Continue reading "ABC drops the F-bomb" »